So, it's more interesting than this. The trees are playing the squirrels. There's a normal amount of acorns that can support a normal amount of squirrels. But once every few years, the trees make a bunch more acorns. More than the normal amount of squirrels can eat. But not frequent enough that the number of squirrels increase. So the squirrels go crazy and hide em everywhere that year, but there's no way they can eat them all, so there are a bunch of acorns planted.
Tldr: trees manipulate # of acorns to get squirrels to plant more.

[–] Frozengyro@lemmy.world 50 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's amazing nature found this blindly and it was the most efficient way to propagate as a species.

[–] stockRot@lemmy.world 61 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It was a good enough* way to propagate as a species

[–] Pelicanen@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Local minimum, not a global minimum. Evolution is one long autoregressive process.

[–] SkinnyTimmy@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

I just learned two new words